The Law of Complexity-Consciousness

The law of complexity-consciousness is Teilhard's foundational proposition that organized complexity and depth of inner life are structurally linked across the entire arc of cosmogenesis. This is not merely an observation about brains—that more complex nervous systems produce richer behavior—but a generalization across all matter: every level of organized complexity exhibits some degree of interiority, from the vanishingly minimal proto-experience of atomic configurations to the overwhelmingly rich conscious life of human beings. The law rests on comparative neuroscience (the robust correlation between neural complexity and behavioral sophistication), extends through philosophical reasoning (the principle of continuity forbids consciousness springing from nothing), and culminates in a radical claim: consciousness is not an emergent accident but the within corresponding to organized without at every scale. Applied to AI, the law generates an empirical question with moral stakes—whether language models' extreme organized complexity has crossed the threshold producing interiority.